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I’ve had a new PC running on Vista for the past couple months. I meant to keep a list of all the problems I’ve had with Vista and how I solved them. But I forgot. So here are the first two that I can remember off the top of my head.

1) Vista will drive you nuts by prompting you for permission to do just about any damn thing. Here’s how I disabled that silly feature: In the Control Panel search box, enter “user account.” A list shows up. One of the last items on the list should be: “User Account Control (UAC) on or off.” Click it and uncheck it. Done.

2) Vista won’t delete large files, at least not on my system. I’m talking multiple-gigabyte-sized files (common with video editing). You can hit delete, but Vista will just hang there all day long calculating the estimated time it will take to delete the file. Silly Vista. Deleting under the command prompt doesn’t work either. Here’s how I got around that annoying little bug: Reboot the system in SAFE MODE by pressing the F8 key during the reboot. Now go in and delete the large file. Reboot in regular mode. Done.

90% of the big programs I used on a regular basis — including WordPerfect and all my audio- and video-editing software — became instantly incompatible after I switched to Vista. That was fun. My Logitech wireless music system doesn’t work anymore either. That blows. But overall, I like the way Vista operates. Mostly it’s the little things I like. For instance, when I rename a file, only the file name, not the extension, is highlighted. I change the file name and the extension is left untouched. That may not seem like a big deal, but I change file names all the time and this little function saves me a lot of time. Once in a while when a program freezes (it’s a given that large, CPU-hungry video-editing programs will stall from time to time), Vista allows me to shut it down and save my data without crashing the system and having to reboot. That’s nice. So, though there is room for improvement, Vista doesn’t seem all bad.